1. Technical Field
The invention is related to cursor devices, and more particularly to a system and process for directing a laser beam within a space to act as a cursor in an intelligent computing environment.
2. Background Art
Ubiquitous (i.e., intelligent) computing promises to blur the boundaries between traditional desktop computing and the everyday physical world. A popular vision of tomorrow's computing pushes computational abilities into everyday objects, each participating in a complex and powerful integrated intelligent environment. Tomorrow's home and office environments, for example, may include a variety of small and large networked displays and smart controllable devices. For instance, the modern living room typically features a television, amplifier, DVD player, lights, computers, and so on. In the near future, these devices will become more inter-connected, more numerous and more specialized as part of an increasingly complex and powerful integrated intelligent environment.
This migration away from the desktop and “into the walls” presents several challenges for user interface design. For example, how does the user of tomorrow's intelligent environment select one of many devices? Today, this problem is most often addressed by maintaining a separate interface, such as an IR remote control, for each device.
Tomorrow's intelligent environment presents the opportunity to present a single intelligent user interface (UI) to control many such devices when they are networked. This UI device should provide the user a natural interaction with intelligent environments. For example, people have become quite accustomed to pointing at a piece of electronic equipment that they want to control, owing to the extensive use of IR remote controls. It has become almost second nature for a person in a modern environment to point at the object he or she wants to control, even when it is not necessary. Take the small radio frequency (RF) key fobs that are used to lock and unlock most automobiles in the past few years as an example. Inevitably, a driver will point the free end of the key fob toward the car while pressing the lock or unlock button. This is done even though the driver could just have well pointed the fob away from the car, or even pressed the button while still in his or her pocket, owing to the RF nature of the device. Thus, a single UI device, which is pointed at electronic components or some extension thereof (e.g., a wall switch to control lighting in a room) to control these components, would represent an example of the aforementioned natural interaction that is desirable for such a device.
There are some so-called “universal” remote controls on the market that are preprogrammed with the known control protocols of a litany of electronic components, or which are designed to learn the command protocol of an electronic component. Typically, such devices are limited to one transmission scheme, such as IR or RF, and so can control only electronic components operating on that scheme. However, it would be desirable if the electronic components themselves were passive in that they do not have to receive and process commands from the UI device directly, but would instead rely solely on control inputs from the aforementioned network. In this way, the UI device does not have to differentiate among various electronic components, say by recognizing the component in some manner and transmitting commands using some encoding scheme applicable only to that component, as is the case with existing universal remote controls.
Of course, a common control protocol could be implemented such that all the controllable electronic components within an environment use the same control protocol and transmission scheme. However, this would require all the electronic components to be customized to the protocol and transmission scheme, or to be modified to recognize the protocol and scheme. This could add considerably to the cost of a “single UI-controlled” environment. It would be much more desirable if the UI device could be used to control any networked group of new or existing electronic components regardless of remote control protocols or transmission schemes the components were intended to operate under.
It is noted that in the remainder of this specification, the description refers to various individual publications identified by a numeric designator contained within a pair of brackets. For example, such a reference may be identified by reciting, “reference [1]” or simply “[1]”. A listing of references including the publications corresponding to each designator can be found at the end of the Detailed Description section.